The Importance of Being on Time

Summer seems to have struck Buenos Aires early and suddenly this year, and the city has wasted no time in filling itself with short skirts, tank tops and mosquitoes, and a refrain of “que calor de loco!”

Already?!?

This might not provoke much surprise from those of you living in the Northern hemisphere who are already getting tired of the exhausting summer humidity. But I’ve been back in town just under two weeks and I still remember acutely the feeling of stepping off the plane that had just gotten in from Miami. Something like “why the hell did I come back?” Two days later, the weather turned absolutely gorgeous (and considerably less humid than Miami had been!) and my friends and neighbors begin to complain about the heat, causing me to wonder if Porteños might actually give Clevelanders competition in their ability to complain about everything…

You might well be wondering now “what were you doing in Miami?” Or if you’ve been reading faithfully—“how the hell did you get there from Posadas? And did you ever make it to Paraguay? (If not you’re just wondering what the hell I’m talking about…)

As I’m typing this I have a several page word document, open in another window, of the things I’ve been writing about my travels through Argentina and Paraguay, which transpired almost a month ago. I have two journals back in my bedroom which have bits and pieces of things which I wrote on the way; all things that I really wanted people besides me to read at some point.

The reasons they are still there are at once complicated and simple, a blog is something you don’t have to do, and, at least in my case, is mostly for your own vanity (though you hope other people might get something out of it). The more time passes from the events of the story the less relevant they seem. This is also one of the qualities of the blog as a writing medium. As Andrew Sullivan suggests in an essay for his blog The Daily Dish, the blog is a medium of the now. Because it is possible to write about events that happened literally five minutes ago, the very immediacy of it, the unedited quality—with most blog sites now you view the finished product in the same HTML-free script that the author used to write it—means that it is a medium constantly in the present tense. This makes it difficult to go back and add things once they’ve passed, puts pressure against any tendency the author might have towards a kind of narration, or some kind of gradual development of ideas.


Yet this problem can actually be a very good thing. For those of us who write or essays or journals or novels in our spare time, the tendency for our work to sit in dusty old notebooks and make it no farther than that is extremely high. This isn’t only because we’re terrible writers, or because the market is tiny and no one will publish us. It’s also because it’s very difficult to generate a push for the writing to move beyond that point, for ideas to be developed, for drafts to be edited. After the initial inspiration and the scribbling in journals the initial impetus to publish often fades. Tomorrow becomes eternity.

By contrast a blog has a certain kind of deadline. It still isn’t an explicit one—at least for most of us there’s no one breathing down our necks making sure it gets published now—and yet there is an implicit deadline inherent in the fact that you have to believe that if you don’t write it—and publish it—right away it will not happen. Other things will come up, more interesting ideas, other things to write about. Digging into the archives of writing topics will seem absurd.

Besides the euphoria of this August Indian summer, getting back to Buenos Aires has meant getting myself into the rhythms of a new semester, new classes and gearing up for writing my senior thesis, which I’ll be spending the semester on. Understanding well the natural propensities of college students, my study abroad program in conjunction with the Fundación Simón Rodriguez (the foundation which organizes the research option for IFSA) designs the research option as a series of meetings with an advisor, where every week you’re required to turn in a part of the project by email the day before the meeting. It’s a good system and not a bad way for me to organize the blog as well.

If only the rest of life were like that. I’m a senior now, with the knowledge that when I return to Case it’ll be to finish up my last semester of college. The question of “now what?” is not the one that worries me so much—I’m going to look for a job in at whatever they’ll pay me to do. I’ve lowered my expectations about what that will be. No, I’m more worried about when I’m going to get around to doing what it is that I want to do. I’m worried about the absence of those week deadlines.

Of course there is a deadline. But if the best deadlines are the ones that come often and predictably, then death is a pretty poor one, as it is neither. For most of your life it’s far away and you don’t see it, and then when it comes you often didn’t see it coming. “If I’d known I was going to die at fifty I would have done things differently!” But you didn’t and now you’ve got the rest of eternity to be frustrated about it.

Even what it is we wanted to do can be hard to figure out? While you’re studying you have a vague sense that there’s something you want to do after you graduate but you’re not sure what. You get sidetracked (but from what?), you fall in love, get married and take a job that has nothing to do with your masters degree, so you can pay the bills while your spouse gets his PhD. And then twenty years later you’re a widow with grown children and trying to remember what it was you wanted to do when you grew up.

Or maybe you always felt a sort of vague unease with the system but you never really knew what else there was out there. You drop out of the University where you were studying French or physics (and what the hell were you supposed to do with that, no one ever let you in on that). You start working because it’s something you’ve got to do and you dream about doing great things, though it’s not quite clear what really. In the meantime you learn a lot about the world, making lots of friends and open yourself up to life’s possibilities. But you still don’t have your own family and you live with your aunt and you’re starting to get old enough so that you have to lie about your age to get dates.

I know these people and you probably do too though their stories may be a little different. Modernity has confused the hell out of people of my age, from age twenty to thirty; our great-grandparents all had families of their own right now. In Buenos Aires there’s a generation of kids that grew up in the new democracy and who were told they were supposed to take advantage of opportunities to live the lives they love, which their parents couldn’t have dreamed of. Then the crash of 2001 comes along, so these kids, now in their thirties, all live with their parents because there just isn’t money right now.

A decade younger than these guys, I wonder what I have to look forward to back home in America...or wherever else. It seems pretty daunting at this juncture to look ahead at ten or twenty years, but then it doesn’t really make any sense to worry about it. Probably makes better sense to concern myself with this week. And maybe finish up that word document in the other window for next week....

Blogger allows you to put whatever date you want on your posts, so when I do get around to posting the story about my travels I’ll be sure to mark the date as earlier than this one (not a complete lie since some of it was already written at that point!)